Research & Development by the big Five: Q2-2018

Starting with Q2/2018, I will publish this little statistics. I think for a tech, these numbers are a little bit more interesting than sales and revenue since it shows what's happening in terms of innovation pushed by the top 5 of the industry.

Alphabet (Google)

Amazon

Apple

Facebook

Microsoft

Absolute

4,17 bn$

7.25 bn$

3.70 bn$

2,52 bn$

3,93 bn$

Relative to Revenue

12,8%

13,7%

5,96%

19,0%

13,0%

What's interesting, that in absolute terms, only Amazon is an "outlier" with spending almost twice as much as Apple in that quarter in absolute terms, while Facebook is on the bottom in terms of absolute, but on top in terms of relative to revenue.

These figures are also driven by the very different business models of those companies and the product ranges.

To what these figures show for the future, I will leave you with your own thoughts.

Also keep in mind that this is only one Quarter from April to June 2018. I will also post a more comprehensive set of numbers to look at the changes over the last couple of years in one of my next posts.